Many problems exist in today's world for a disabled individual with respect to the individual's interaction with others. The present invention focuses mainly on individuals with hearing impediments and their ability to interact with people in certain situations, e.g., at meetings. For example, when a deaf person is at a meeting he or she is unable to understand what is being said or by whom.
One unique solution designed to provide a remedy to this problem is disclosed in the U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/774,930, entitled “Universal Closed Caption Portable Receiver,” filed Jan. 31, 2001, and the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein. In one illustrative aspect disclosed in the U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/774,930, a portable and universal closed caption receiving device is provided for receiving a text-based signal from a stenographic transcription service. The text corresponds to audio content associated with some live performance or activity at which the wearer of the device is present and/or participating in. The closed caption receiving device is used in conjunction with a display system carried by the user such as, for example, a wearable head mounted display. The closed captioning device receives the textual transcription from the transcription service provider while the user watches (participates in) the live event. The text is provided to the head mounted display worn by the user such that the displayed text may be read by the user at the same time the user is able to view the event through the display itself. Also disclosed, as an alternative embodiment, the text displayed to the wearer may be generated by a voice recognition system resident on (or remote from but connected to) the closed caption receiving device, rather than by a stenographic transcription service.
The U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/774,930 discloses many examples of head mounted displays that may be employed, e.g., the eyeglass-based microdisplay system available from MicroOptical Corporation (Westwood, Mass.); the ergonomic wearable personal display from Invisio Inc. (Sunnydale, Calif.); and the compact optical display system associated with the wearable personal computer from IBM Corporation (Armonk, N.Y.) as described, for example, in U.S. patent applications identified by Ser. No. 09/437,972 filed Nov. 10, 1999; Ser. No. 09/437,793 filed on Nov. 10, 1999; and/or Ser. No. 29/110,706 filed on Sep. 10, 1999, assigned to the present assignee and incorporated by reference herein. However, it is pointed out that one of ordinary skill in the art will realize various other wearable display systems that may be employed in conjunction with the closed caption receiver.
While the solution provided by the above-described closed caption receiving system provides individuals with hearing impairments with an extremely useful solution, in certain circumstances the individual, himself, may not always be able to identify who is speaking if there are several people participating in the meeting. That is, while the user can see transcriptions of the speech that is going on in the meeting, there may be several speakers in the room, and if the user does not look at the speaker at the moment he or she started to speak, the user may miss the information about who is speaking especially if a speaker asked a short question. Also, a person may be speaking but the user may not know where that person is and may end up looking at the wrong person when they see that person's lips moving.
Further, even in the situation where a stenographic transcription or voice recognition result associates a name with the displayed text, the hearing impaired individual may not know the names of the speakers in the meeting and, thus, displaying the name of the speaker with the text would still not help the user to easily identify who is speaking.
Alternatively, it is possible to have a live aid at the site of the meeting and have the aid somehow communicate with the handicapped person, via sign language or any other form of communication, in order to indicate who is speaking and what they are saying. While this can be an efficient solution, it requires a significant amount of time for the actual translation process and some context may be lost. Also, the task of finding an available aid may be difficult. Still further, besides being time consuming, use of a live aid for an extended period of time can be very expensive.